PJL: October 2013 (Part 2)

Even if you haven't heard of this pizza, you have tasted the fruits of its labor. As the first documented pizzeria in the U.S. (it opened in 1905), Lombardi's was crucial in turning an Italian dish into a mass-market obsession. To be sure, it had help: other eateries such as TK and TK opened whenTK, courting soldiers from WWII who had been stationed in Naples and craved the local snacks. But as so and so says, "nothing beats the original."

Robin Hammond / Panos Pictures

Robin Hammond: No One Hear Our Cry (Panos Pictures) Ten years on from the end of the dreadful civil war in Liberia, thousands of former child soldiers are still struggling to find a role in the peaceful country and adapt to the new realities

Lynsey Addario: Breast Cancer as Death Sentence in Uganda (NYT Lens) On an assignment in Uganda reporting on early breast cancer detection, Addario photographed a cancer ward that serves four countries, as the region is scarce of expertise and supplies

Michael Christopher Brown: The Kivus: Goma Airport (Magnum Photos) Children playing on abandoned planes at the Goma airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Willie Nelson is always on our minds, but especially this week, because he's celebrating his 81st birthday. And also because on Monday, the legendary singer received his fifth-degree black belt in GongKwon Yusul, a martial art which he's been practicing for 20 years.
"It's just good for you physically. For your lungs. The more you're breathing, exercising, the better you’re going to feel," Nelson told Austin's KVUE.
Shortly before the ceremony, the singer told the Associated Press that he was surprised to be receiving the degree at all. "I don't know what else is out there," he said. "I never thought about anything beyond second-degree black belt."
Though Nelson is best known for his music (and for his prolific pot habit), it's a bit lesser known that he's very into martial arts too.
"I think martial arts is one of the best exercises you can do. Mentally, spiritually, physically, everything," he told the AP.
This past weekend, Nelson was also inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, so he's had a pretty good week.

Ed Kashi / National Geographic

Ed Kashi: Northern Nigeria Conflict (National Geographic) Islamist terrorists fight for the north | From the November issue of National Geographic magazine

Robin Hammond: Condemned (LightBox) Treatment of mentally ill in Sub-Saharan Africa | The work just received W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography

Willie Nelson is always on our minds, but especially this week, because he's celebrating his 81st birthday. On Monday, the legendary singer received his fifth-degree black belt in GongKwon Yusul, a martial art which he's been practicing for 20 years.
"It's just good for you physically. For your lungs. The more you're breathing, exercising, the better you’re going to feel," Nelson told Austin's KVUE.
Shortly before the ceremony, the singer told the Associated Press that he was surprised to be receiving the degree at all. "I don't know what else is out there," he said. "I never thought about anything beyond second-degree black belt."
Though Nelson is best known for his music (and for his prolific pot habit), he's clearly very into martial arts too. "I think martial arts is one of the best exercises you can do. Mentally, spiritually, physically, everything," he told the AP."

Peter van Agtmael / Magnum

Peter van Agtmael: Life Under Austerity (MSNBC) For more than a hundred years, coal anchored families to the mountain hollows of eastern Kentucky. But a dying mining industry, and government austerity, has left folks chasing any rumor, any scrap, any whiff of a job that’s still to be had

Spoilers through the first three episodes of Mad Men season 7 follow:
The first scene in season 7 of Mad Men is of Freddy Rumsen pitching an Accutron watch campaign to Peggy Olson. The scene sets up a twist at the end of the episode (Freddy, it turns out, is acting as sock puppet for a still-on-leave Don Draper), but it also suggests how Peggy has risen in the world. Late in season 6, we saw her in Don’s office after he’d been displaced, shot from behind in the classic Draper pose of regally surveying the view out the window. Now, Don (through Freddy) was pitching, and Peggy was judging. She may never have ended up writing copy for Virginia Slims, as had been hinted in an earlier season, but baby, she’d come a long way.
It turned out to be more complicated than that, of course. Peggy, we quickly saw, still had a creative director above her--this time, Lou Avery, who was at least as casually dismissive of her (or her writers’) ideas as Don could be and showed even less respect. But with Don out of the office, it looked like Peggy--who, as Willa Paskin noted in New York magazine, is in many ways the secret protagonist of Mad Men--would have a central role in the doings at SC&P.
But beginning with that premiere episode, Peggy’s story has taken a strange turn. Since the beginning of the series, she’s often seemed to be a kind of mirror, alternative Don, and we soon saw that she, like him, was unmoored in 1969--except that her unmooring, apparently, was all about a man, Ted Chaough. The premiere found her awkwardly encountering her awkward ex-boss and -lover in the SC&P kitchenette, and ended with her sobbing, alone, by the door of her empty apartment. Come Valentine’s Day, a case of mistaken identity regarding a bouquet of roses sent her into an unfocused rage, leaving an angry message for a puzzled Ted and yelling at her secretary Shirley for “embarrassing” her in an it’s-all-about-me tone that would do Hannah Horvath proud. Episode 3 showed her only briefly, as she icily told Don, “Can’t say that we missed you,” her hostility, seemingly, driven largely by Don’s having yielded the job in California to Ted.
Where have you hidden our Peggy, Mad Men? And how did you replace her with this hostile, unpleasant basket case, lashing out at everyone in sight and pining over a long-lost married man?
It’s not implausible or belittling that Peggy should be a wreck, even months later--any more than it was, say, for Don to fall to pieces over his rejection by his neighbor Sylvia last year. One great aspect of Peggy as a character, and Mad Men’s treatment of her as a character, is that she’s an individual, not a composite, not a stand-in for womankind, not an icon. It's to the show's credit that it has always drawn her from the perspective of what she as a person would want, not what we as the audience need her to be. You can relate to her wit and ambition and yet see that can she sometimes be cold, self-centered--human.
There problem here is that right now Angry Lovelorn Peggy is all the show is giving us. Don can be fighting for his professional life and yet still struggle in his marriage and with his kids--hell, that’s sort of what he’s for. And Peggy, conversely, has wrestled with personal issues--Abe, her pregnancy, her mother--and thrown herself into her work at the same time. Right now, though, the balance seems badly off; what we see of Peggy at the office is refracted almost entirely through reminders that she’s shattered over Ted to the point of seeming like a different person. (All of that, of course, complicated by the fact that Ted was not just her lover, but the best, most encouraging boss she’d had.)
It isn’t about the show being obligated to make Peggy perfectly likeable, or empowered, or happy. It is about maintaining the complexity of a character who, over six seasons, has become the de facto female lead; or, at least, if her character radically changes, providing a reason beyond, “She went through a really bad breakup last season.”
I write all this, of course, with the knowledge that this is very early in the season, and episode four could entirely turn me around on Peggy and whatever’s eating her this year. (Episode three or four of a season is also often where fans begin grousing that Mad Men is going nowhere, just before it achieves liftoff.) But I worry. As we’ve seen with Don, Mad Men can be captivating when a character is losing his sense of himself. I just hope, with Peggy, that the series isn’t losing its sense of her.

The Tzukuri iPhone app connects via low-power Bluetooth to a pair of sunglasses, tracking their location so you don't lose them.

Q. Sakamaki

Q. Sakamaki: Japan (Photo Booth) Sakamaki’s pocket-size window into life all over the country, from daily commutes in Tokyo to the surf culture along the coast of the Sagami Bay, in central Japan

Ashley Gilbertson: A Game of Shark and Minnow (NYT magazine) multimedia | The shell of a forsaken ship has become a battleground in a struggle that could shape the future of the South China Sea

Marie Dorigny: High in Nepal, a Lowly Status for Women (NYT Lens) When Dorigny first visited Nepal 20 years ago, things seemed on the right path. On her most recent trip, however, she was appalled by the worsening situation for women, who face abuse

Willie Nelson is always on our minds, but especially this week, because he's celebrating his 81st birthday. And also because on Monday, the legendary singer received his fifth-degree black belt in GongKwon Yusul, a martial art which he's been practicing for 20 years.
"It's just good for you physically. For your lungs. The more you're breathing, exercising, the better you’re going to feel," Nelson told Austin's KVUE.
Shortly before the ceremony, the singer told the Associated Press that he was surprised to be receiving the degree at all. "I don't know what else is out there," he said. "I never thought about anything beyond second-degree black belt."
Though Nelson is best known for his music (and for his prolific pot habit), it's a bit lesser known that he's very into martial arts too.
"I think martial arts is one of the best exercises you can do. Mentally, spiritually, physically, everything," he told the AP.
This past weekend, Nelson was also inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, so it's been a pretty good week.

The White House has released a star-studded public service announcement on YouTube to accompany its plan announced Tuesday to combat sexual assault in the United States.
The video's message is simple, direct and though it doesn't say so explicitly, targeted at one class of people in particular: men.
"If I saw it happening I'd never blame her. I'd help her," says actor Daniel Craig.
"It's up to all of us to put an end to sexual assault and that starts with you," says President Barack Obama.
Other leading men who make an appearance in the PSA, which is titled "1 is 2 Many," include West Wing actor Dulé Hill, Vice President Joe Biden, actor Benicio del Toro, late night host Seth Meyers and comedian and actor Steve Carell.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLdElcv5qqc&w=600&h=350]

The Unseen Dorothea Lange (CNN Photo Blog) A new monograph, “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” is a retrospective of Lange’s career. Spanning three decades, it includes her famous work as well as lesser-known and rarely seen photographs, including Japanese internment camp relocations and her global travels

The White House has released a star-studded public service announcement on YouTube to accompany its plan announced Tuesday to combat sexual assault in the United States.
The video's message is simple, direct and though it doesn't say so explicitly, targeted at one class of people in particular: men.
"If I saw it happening I'd never blame her. I'd help her," says actor Daniel Craig.
"It's up to all of us to put an end to sexual assault and that starts with you," says President Barack Obama.
Other leading men who make an appearance in the PSA, which is titled "1 is 2 Many," include West Wing actor Dulé Hill, Vice President Joe Biden, actor Benicio del Toro, late night host Seth Meyers and comedian and actor Steve Carell.

Steve McCurry (NBC) McCurry talks about his iconic National Geographic “Afghan Girl” photo, in the first edition of Ann Curry’s “Depth of Field”, a series of intimate conversations with the world’s leading photojournalists who reveal the stories behind their most provocative and acclaimed images

On Sunday afternoon, Lieutenant Vitali Artyukh, the deputy commander of an elite police squadron in eastern Ukraine, was standing guard with a detachment of his men at the state television headquarters in the city of Donetsk. From the windshield of his police car, a Honda CR-V, he saw a crowd of several hundred people moving up the street toward the gates of the building. It was led by a small group of masked men armed with clubs and metal shields, but mostly they were regular locals, many of them elderly, a few carrying Russian flags. Artyukh’s team, made up of about a dozen men armed with assault rifles, stood aside as the crowd surged through the gate and into the building. Within a few hours, the local news station’s frequency – channel 27 – was showing the Russian state network Rossiya.
Thus passed another average day in the life of Donetsk. In the past two weeks, pro-Russian separatists have used this tactic to capture dozens of government buildings in eastern Ukraine, and if local security forces showed some resistance initially, they have now stopped putting up any kind of fight. Their reasoning is simple: they lose either way. If Russia makes good on its threats to invade eastern Ukraine, the police there could face a war tribunal for using force against civilians. If Russia doesn’t invade, the Kiev authorities could still turn them into scapegoats. The last time the police got orders to fire on civilians in Ukraine, during the revolution in February, a dozen officers wound up facing charges for mass murder. “We know the score,” Artyukh tells TIME outside the captured TV station. “If the orders come down to resist these mobs, it would be impossible to comply,” he says. “It would be a bloodbath, and no one wants to take that on his conscience.”
That seems to be part of the trap Russia has set in Ukraine’s eastern regions. For weeks, its television networks, as well as armed Cossacks and provocateurs from across the border, have been feeding the separatist fires. In the Russian media, talk shows and editorials lionize the pro-Russian forces and demonize Kiev for “waging war” against its own people. All the while, the central government has watched the ranks of its police and security agencies fall apart, their officer corps infiltrated by separatist informers, eroded by defectors and demoralized by pro-Russian locals who accuse them of treason. Day by day, that process has been whittling Kiev’s options down to one—send in the military to take back control. After that, Moscow would have the prefect excuse to invade under the guise of a peacekeeping mission.
Moreover, sending in the military at this point wouldn't make much of a difference for Kiev's grip on the region of Donetsk, where separatist forces could seize every state institution in the course of a week if they keep going at their current pace. That Kiev understands this became clear on Tuesday afternoon, when the governor of Donetsk, Serhiy Taruta, called together all of the mayors in the region who still recognize Kiev’s authority. Because his office was overrun by separatists two weeks ago, Taruta convened the meeting at the regional chamber of commerce at the edge of town, and about 80 local officials showed up, including a few dozen mayors. Taruta, a local tycoon whose heavy-framed spectacles and bookish manners have earned him the nickname Woody Allen among the local journalists, began by delivering a message from the capital: No cavalry is coming to save them. “It’s up to us,” he said.
To appease the separatists, Kiev had agreed to hold a referendum on June 15 [Is this confirmed? Just looking around and the only reports I can find say that they are thinking about this? Could be looking at the wrong thing, though. Is there a link we could throw in?], allowing the eastern regions to win more autonomy from the capital without breaking away entirely. “Explain to the citizens that if they want a referendum, they’ll get one,” Taruta said. “But only as the law provides, not under the anarchy that has arisen.” For the assembled officials, this was not only a half-measure but a tardy one.
The first man to raise his hand when the governor finished speaking was the mayor of Konstantinovka, a towering figure named Sergei Davydov, who shared an illustrative anecdote. Earlier that day, he said, the “commandante” of the local separatists in his town had come into his office with three gunmen and informed the mayor that a referendum would be held in about two weeks, on May 11. It would not call for greater autonomy, the commandante explained, but for the secession of Donetsk from Ukraine. Taruta’s reply to this story sent peels of laughter through the hall. “First of all,” the governor said, “you should have asked for their identity papers.”
The mayor confessed that he hadn’t considered such a response. “When there are three guys with automatic weapons in your office, it doesn’t exactly set the right tone for a conversation,” Davydov said. His understatement elicited another wave of laughter. “You tell us to hold on and we’re holding on,” Davydov continued, addressing the governor. “But I’m sitting there practically alone… One guy with a gun could take over city hall right now. That’s the reality.”
The only thing Taruta could offer in response was an appeal to “engage with the people,” he said. “We have a lot of complaints about the work of our law enforcement agencies. Let’s be honest about that… So we’re going to increase the number of law enforcement representatives. There’s just no other choice.”
But after their performance in the past few days, the local police do not instill much confidence, neither among the public nor with the officials who are trying to maintain some semblance of control. On Monday, a group of activists in Donetsk organized a march in support of Ukrainian unity, and a gang of separatists attacked them with clubs and metal bars, sending women, children and elderly people fleeing in every direction. Although a detachment of riot police did make some efforts to hold the attackers back and restrain them from beating people to death, many of the officers stayed out of the mayhem, and they did not make any arrests. So when the assault was over, two dozen people were injured, five hospitalized and seven briefly taken hostage by the separatists, according to the organizers of the march.
Within the ranks of the Security Service of Ukraine, the domestic spy agency known as the SBU, roughly the same picture has emerged. Over the weekend, three of its agents were taken hostage in the region of Donetsk and transported to the separatist stronghold of Slavyansk, which has been completely taken over by well-armed rebel fighters. Russian state media were then given access to the prisoners on Sunday, and they aired footage of three men sitting in an office in their underwear, bleeding into the packing tape that had been used to blindfold them.
The following day, SBU confirmed that the hostages were from its elite counterterrorism squad, the Alfa Group, and had been sent to the region to gather intelligence on the separatist fighters. Most disheartening of all for their comrades was the fact that their capture was the result of a leak from within the agency. According to a source who was briefed on the SBU’s investigation of the incident, the leak came from the commander of their reconnaissance mission. He had been working as a double agent, the source told TIME on Tuesday, and had outed his own men to the separatists.
For Igor Smeshko, who served as the head of the SBU from 2003 to 2005, such incidents hardly come as a shock. The ruling elites in Ukraine’s eastern regions, he says, have long been in bed with local criminals, and they in turn appointed law enforcement officials who suited their interests. “For all of these last 20 years, they have very much influenced the central government’s [nominations] of chiefs of police, of security services. In some way, they even influenced the nomination of the army commanders of detachments in those regions.”
The only response, Smeshko suggests, is to conduct a purge of the officer corps in every branch of Ukraine’s security services, and the Kiev government seems to be taking that advice.
On April 26, interim President Oleksandr Turchynov announced a massive shake-up in just about every agency with uniformed personnel in Ukraine. “Without a doubt, there will be a serious reform of the security structures, including the general prosecutor’s office,” he said. “These must become the agencies of a democratic country, ones that are essentially unable to carry out criminal orders.”
But that did not send a very clear message to the policeman trying to keep the peace in Donetsk. Who will be the judge of what orders are criminal? Who decides which separatists should be considered terrorists and who should be treated as a civilian? Such questions are well above the pay grade of officers like Lieutenant Artyukh, who has no intention of risking his freedom or his life by using force against the pro-Russian mobs. So when the building he had been ordered to guard was taken over on Monday [Should this be Sunday, as in the first par?], he sat down in the passenger seat of his cruiser and watched events unfold. “What now? Now nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation on Vimeo

Stanley Greene (Thomson Reuters Foundation) Greene worked in Jabal al-Zawiya in northwest Syria in March and in Aleppo in April. There he found a war that had pushed people almost beyond the limits of sanity

Iwan Baan (Ted.com) Photographer Iwan Baan shows how people build homes in unlikely places, touring us through the family apartments of Torre David, a city on the water in Nigeria, and an underground village in China

Michael Wolf (The New Republic) Wolf on his project documenting Hong Kong’s architecture of density

A father's rights advocate finally stood up and said enough to librarian apologists who spread the lascivious gospel of Dr. Seuss's classic Hop on Pop.
The Toronto Public Library released its annual review committee notes Monday, which included a request to ban the 1963 Dr. Seuss classic for "encourag[ing] children to use violence against their fathers." The traumatized complainant not only asked libraries to pull the book from its collection and issue a formal apology to the fathers of Toronto, but also that they "pay for damages resulting from the book."
Even American dignitaries have been complicit in spreading Seuss' dangerous propaganda. First Lady and former librarian Laura Bush touted Hop on Pop as one of her personal favorites to the Wall Street Journal, recalling when her daughters took the book "literally" and (trigger warning ahead) jumped on President Bush's stomach. "We have the pictures to prove it," she said. To our knowledge, Barbara and Jenna were never charged in the incident.
The Toronto Library system did not submit to the complainant's belly aching. The book remains in circulation in part because the children in the book are, in fact, told not to hop on Pop.
Now is when we'd make jokes about GMO protestors launching a campaign against Green Eggs and Ham … but we don't want to give anyone any ideas considering it was already banned in China for its "portrayal of early Marxism" and briefly in California for allegedly touting acts of homosexual seduction.

David Maisel (A Photo Editor) Maisel on his The Mining Project and other works

Mosaab Elshamy (BBC) The drama and turmoil in Egypt of the past few years has been captured by photographer Mosaab Elshamy, whose pictures tell a story of upheaval and its impact on the lives of those around him